Volt Hunters

We lived together very well, back when we did, because we knew when to be together and when to be apart. It was a trick we could pull off even in the same room, in adjacent chairs. We knew how to “give space” under conditions where giving space wasn’t technically possible. Most of the time we spend together, nobody is talking. That’s why I have generally said that we are not friends; I think of a friend as being someone who is present. What we offer each other is solitude without loneliness.

It doesn’t really have anything to do with the strip, it’s just something I was thinking about.

The strip is about the kind of kilowatt hours you pull down when you live in a dork house. I think it’s fair to say that Gabriel was hauling volts even before he installed a Goddamned arcade in his garage, but the arrival of several devices conceived before modern conservation was a byword probably did not help matters and may have, in fact, harmed them.

I put things in the right bins, I’m that type of citizen, but some of that is because I once worked at a place where I had to separate the things people put into the wrong bins. I am specifically not telling you stories about this, because it’s entirely possible that you are eating lunch while reading the site, and I want to ensure that the process is unidirectional. But whatever young person they’ve corralled doesn’t need the extra work. I have every faith that their task is already sufficiently vile.

Moving the office has made me want to use more volts, but in place of fuel to move a car, and I don’t know if Electric Cars are a wash or what. I put things in the right bins, but I don’t “revere Gaia” or engage in any of the other animism associated with bin-putting-in. But they literally have to drive the gas to me. I don’t want to say using gasoline is… unconscionable, even though that feels like the right word, but the inefficiency of it is maddening. It seems like a dumb thing to do with a finite resource, like drinking a Hi-Potion to heal 10 HP. If there’s another way to do it, and I can, then I should.